Experts Say Interest In Vietnam War Is Rising

April 25, 1988|The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- The number of college courses on the Vietnam War has exploded in the past few years to more than 400, reflecting widespread interest by young Americans about the war, according to experts at a major conference on teaching about Vietnam.

But most of these classes are being given at smaller or less-prestigious colleges, and relatively few professional historians or political scientists are conducting research or teaching about the war, conference participants agreed.

This disparity in some ways mirrors the situation in the long and divisive Vietnam War, when better educated and more affluent young Americans managed to avoid the draft, leaving most of the fighting to be done by the sons of families from the working class or from minority groups.

The contradictory interest in Vietnam was underscored by a number of statistics presented at the conference on Friday and Saturday. Allan E. Goodman, a professor at Georgetown University`s School of Foreign Service, said that despite the large number of courses now being offered on Vietnam, no courses are being given by the political science departments at 75 percent of the nation`s top 100 colleges and universities, as rated by Barrons Profiles of American Colleges.

He said that at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association last year, only 3 of the 1,000 scholarly papers dealt with Vietnam, and only one of the 87 panels at this year`s convention of the Association for Asian Studies touched on Vietnam.

By contrast, Joe Dunn, a professor of history at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., said that at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association last month, 17 sessions and 65 papers were devoted to Vietnam.

``These people are not specialists on Vietnam,`` Dunn said of the participants at the Popular Culture Association. ``They are teachers of film, TV, literature or art, and I honestly believe many of them could not find Vietnam on a map. But they are young academists just discovering Vietnam, and their excitment is very real.``

What is happening with the teaching of the Vietnam War, Dunn said, ``is a revolution from the bottom up.`` The new courses on the war are being given at ``the less prestigious state universities, branch campuses and community colleges,`` he said.

One reason for the increased number of courses on Vietnam is that state schools and smaller private colleges must worry about funds, and have found that courses on Vietnam draw heavy enrollments, he said.